'96 OLYMPICS.

Softball Team Ready To Percolate

Olympians Eager To Show Prowess On World Stage

June 03, 1996|By Bonnie DeSimone, Tribune Staff Writer.

If this is Saturday, it must be Schaumburg, and the U.S. Olympic softball team is welcoming 3,000 new friends to the show that never ends.

No matter that rain is pelting the field and the opponents in this exhibition double-header are, respectively, a group of Midwestern college standouts and an assortment of local all-stars. There is no mercy shown, except in the mercy rule that terminates both games early with identical 8-0 scores.

Caffeinated, that's what these women are. Double-grande-espressos of ballplayers who dive and double-steal and induce people to swing at pitches that are about as close to the strike zone as they are to the Wisconsin border.

They do this because partly because they can't help themselves and partly because they know this is what the people huddled under umbrellas came to see: the team that takes nothing for granted in the game everyone knows how to play.

U.S. national teams have gone 110-1 in international play over the last 10 years, but this edition is resisting, with all its might, the idea that this summer's inaugural Olympic softball competition is a walk-through on the way to coronation.

"We thrive on pressure," said pitcher Lisa Fernandez of Long Beach, Calif., who did not allow a baserunner in the first game--the 32nd of a 21-city pre-Games tour ending in early July. "We realize when you're No. 1, everyone guns for you. We can't relax against Puerto Rico, we can't relax against Holland."

Or against the various lambs that have been led to slaughter on this exhibition tour, in which the team is now 33-1.

Fernandez, 25, eschews relaxation on the mound or at third base, where she played the second game of the double-header, hopping up and down between plays.

She has a 66-m.p.h. fastball, a change-up that comes in like the planet Jupiter and floats away like a dandelion seed, and a mysterious "drop" that corkscrews toward the plate with no apparent respect for the laws of physics. She finished her UCLA career with an ERA of 0.51 and a batting average of .510. She has her own signature Louisville Slugger bat.

The resume is typical for this team.

Fellow pitcher Michele Smith, 28, a left-hander from Califon, N.J., has never allowed an earned run in international play. She also speaks fluent Japanese and plans to pursue a medical career after the Olympics. Doctors helped put her back together after an auto accident 10 years ago severed the muscle and nerve endings in her pitching arm.

Shortstop Dot Richardson of Orlando is an orthopedic surgeon who will enter her third year of residency at the USC Medical Center this fall and who has shuttled between scrubs and cleats for some years. The 34-year-old batted .469 with 15 hits and 10 RBI on last year's gold medal team at the Pan American Games.

Many of the players on the roster are, like Fernandez, Smith and Richardson, veterans of world-class softball. But one high school player, 18-year-old Christa Williams of Houston, made an improbable journey to the final 15. Her father, without telling her, sent in an application that got her an invitation to national tryouts, along with 2,000 other hopefuls. She played for the junior national team that won a world championship, then made her senior international debut last summer with a no-hitter.

Dani Tyler, 21, of River Forest, an all-conference shortstop at Drake University who now starts at second base, got her first look-see three years ago partly due to a friendly recommendation from a Rock Island coach who saw her in high school. "And my stats," she said. "High school, college--the ASA (American Softball Association) dug deep. They probably had T-ball stats."

Assistant coach Margie Wright said the ruthless selection process culled a group that enjoys the burdens of advance billing.

"With this team, we should have high expectations," said Wright, a former Illinois State coach now at Fresno State University. "No one has come from a losing program. They're highly motivated, and the expect the best of themselves all the time."

Softball is making its Olympic debut this summer. Getting it on the schedule involved years of lobbying, and Wright was one of the coaches who traveled overseas to root the game in new cultures.

"We have given our knowledge to every country we could give it to, and some of them have gone from nothing to the best in the world," she said. "The countries who have really upgraded their programs have patterned them after us. It's like looking in the mirror, especially for those of us who have been around for a while."

One of those up-and-comers is China, the second seed in the Olympics, which ruptured the U.S. win streak at 106 last summer with a 1-0 upset.

"It was a dose of reality for us," said Wright.

Tyler recalls sitting in the team van after the loss in a state of disbelief. "Our head coach (Ralph Raymond) came around and told us, now people won't be waiting for you to lose anymore," she said.

The team avenged the defeat the next day, but there will be some extra java to the Olympic encounter with China, which comes in the last game of the preliminary round in Columbus, Ga.

"Yeah, we're going to be out of our heads for them. And Australia," said Fernandez, who was mobbed by waves of small, pony-tailed autographed seekers as she tried to make her way to the team bus in a downpour. She signed a few. She speaks reverentially of the players before and after her.

Neither she nor any of her teammates on this juggernaut have to be reminded to stop and smell the coffee.